


Windows to the Soul

by sinestrated



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Gen, Making up stuff about Royals, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 17:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3418982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinestrated/pseuds/sinestrated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick finds out why Renard doesn't like to woge in front of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Windows to the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> First (but hopefully not last) Grimm fic. Supposed to take place at least after Season 3 when we find out what happens when wesen woge in front of a Grimm.

It takes a while for Nick to notice.

He should be bothered by that (detective, remember?) but, well, he has other things on his plate. Like being a Grimm, and everything that comes with it—killing things, training with obscure weapons, devouring wesen lore, trying not to get torn apart on a daily basis, killing more things, dodging angry Royals, killing even _more_ things. It keeps a man pretty busy.

 So yes, it takes him a few months to catch it, and then it’s mostly just by accident. They’re trying to get off-the-record information about a case from a shifty young hexenbiest, and she must not like where the conversation is going because she snarls and goes full woge, serene features melting into desiccation and rot. Hank curses and grabs for his gun, and Monroe and Rosalee both woge on reflex, and Nick turns to snatch his own sidearm and so he just happens to look at Renard when it happens.

His captain jerks back, just as startled as the rest of them. His features ripple, a woge in progress—and then he glances sideways at Nick. Something flits across his face: surprise, anger, and, strangely, fear.

Then, in the half a second it takes Nick to blink, Renard’s expression slams down and blanks out like an iron curtain being pulled into place. His features flatten out: smooth, controlled, _human_. If Nick hadn’t been looking, he’d have thought his captain had no reaction at all.

He doesn’t have time to ask, of course. The hexenbiest shrieks and leaps at them, and they all get a little distracted after that.

In fact, it isn’t until later, when he and Hank are back at the precinct trying to find yet another way to explain the dead florist/hexenbiest on their case report without giving Administration a heart attack, when Nick remembers. Pausing his pen mid-sentence, he lifts his head and peers at the captain’s office. Through the blinds, he can just barely make Renard out, broad shoulders hunched as he bends over his laptop. The bright light of the desk lamp paints his features harsh and too-pale like an overexposed photograph, and even from this distance Nick catches every line, every shadow and sharp angle, Renard’s humanity as solid as any mask.

And Nick realizes he can’t remember the last time he saw Renard woge.

Across the desk, Hank huffs and mumbles something about how he isn’t getting paid nearly enough for this. Nick ignores him, scouring his memory. He has faint impressions of the one and only time he and Renard fought, when the captain first revealed his wesen status. He knows Renard woged then, and if he concentrates he gets brief flashes: a strip of rotting skin, the glow of inhuman eyes. But that was almost two years ago, and though Nick has seen Renard get stressed, and worried, and even truly, terrifyingly pissed off since then, he’s never seen him woge again. It’s like when Nick’s around, the zauberbiest doesn’t even exist.

It’s enough to pique Nick’s interest, and from that point on, he really starts watching Renard. He glances at him when they following up on cases together, when they discuss the latest wesen business, when Renard updates him on the latest news from Europe. He watches him at the precinct, regards him carefully when they debrief about a case, when they interrogate suspects, when they run into each other in the break room. Hank gives him weird looks, and Wu looks really torn between making an inappropriate comment and preserving the integrity of his balls, but Nick ignores them both because it starts to get really, really obvious.

Renard doesn’t like to woge in front of him.

And really, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The captain is one of the most controlled people Nick has ever met—you have to be, to get to his position—and a Royal, at that. Someone like that doesn’t just go around wogeing as he pleases. Still, it _bothers_ Nick, because he _knows_ Renard woges in front of other people—Hank, for one, grumbles about the nightmares the captain’s true face gives him, and Monroe and Rosalee talk about zauberbiester with easy familiarity, and even Juliette one evening mentions offhand how Renard looks so different from all the other hexenbiester they’ve seen. So it isn’t that Renard is ashamed, or fearful, or even particularly private about it.

He just doesn’t do it around _Nick._

And well, Nick finds with a jolt that he doesn’t _like_ it. After Renard revealed himself and they forged their odd alliance, shaky at first but growing stronger with each success, Nick feels like they’ve grown closer, not just as Captain and Detective, but as Nick Burkhardt and Sean Renard. He’s seen parts of the captain he never thought he’d see, a bond forming between them forged in steel and battle and blood. They’ve fought together, they’ve bled and killed and nearly died together, and over the last two years Renard has slowly but steadily become someone Nick relies on, a solid pillar of support in a world filled with back-stabbing and betrayal.

He trusts his captain, and not having that trust returned…well, it hurts.

What’s worse is that he can’t explain it. Sure, he’s a Grimm, but Renard’s made it clear he isn’t in the least intimidated by Nick’s bloodline. And surely the captain wouldn’t be so petty as to be embarrassed by how he looks under the human façade. If anything, in the rare times they’ve conversed about it, Nick actually got the impression Renard is proud of his zauberbiest side. He seems to value being wesen a lot more than being Royal, at any rate.

So Nick doesn’t know why Renard refuses to woge in his presence, but he knows it bothers him, and he’s actually pretty sure Renard knows he knows, if the measured, intent looks his captain has been sending his way recently are any indication. And it really doesn’t leave Nick much choice. He needs to ask Renard about this.

Except, it turns out, he doesn’t. Because Viktor von Konigsburg von Asshole Extraordinaire ends up taking care of the whole thing.

Granted, no one saw it coming. In fact, Nick walked into the abandoned warehouse fully expecting to face down a couple of angry hundjagers, so when he finds himself slammed up against the wall with fingers like steel cables around his throat and a smug Royal looking at him like he’s lunch, to say he’s surprised would be an understatement.

Viktor, for his part, looks like the cat who got the canary and then broke into the pet store and ate everything else to boot. “To think, the great Detective Burkhardt trapped so easily,” he purrs, the silkiness of his voice running counterpoint to the way his fingers tighten around Nick’s windpipe. “I’m almost embarrassed for you.”

Nick coughs, prying at the fingers around his neck with one hand while scrabbling for his gun with the other, but of course the holster’s empty, Viktor took care of that when he slammed into Nick out of the darkness with the force of a freight train. The pressure on his windpipe increases; the world grays out a bit at the edges.

“I really should’ve done this a long time ago,” Viktor continues, conversational, like he’s talking to Nick across a table at the local café instead of slowly suffocating him against a damp metal wall. “Would’ve saved the family a great deal of trouble.”

“Fuck…you,” Nick manages, though it’s little more than a hoarse grunt. _Hank,_ he thinks, but his partner is on the other side of the compound, tracking a wesen trail Nick now knows is fake. And Monroe is at the trailer where Nick sent him earlier, and Juliette and Rosalee are at the spice shop, and Renard is doing captainly things at the precinct, and Nick has never felt more alone in his life.

“You should be honored, actually,” Viktor says, and maybe it’s the light, or a hallucination brought on by rapidly-depleting oxygen, but Nick thinks his eyes change: they turn red, not light like a blutbad’s but a deep, dark red like wine, like blood. Like everything evil in the world.

Then Viktor hisses and shoves him, lifting him entirely off his feet as the pressure increases and Nick gasps for air that isn’t there, blood pounding in his ears as he tries to kick out, tries to escape but he can’t, he’s caught, he’s going to die—

“Not many get to see our true forms,” Viktor says, and his voice has changed now too: deeper, darker, echoing like something vast and infinite. “So consider this your final privilege, Grimm.”

And then—there’s no other way to explain it—his face collapses. The humanity crumbles like earth falling into a sinkhole, skin giving way to darkness, utter and complete. And even though he’s on the verge of passing out, even though black spots are growing at the corners of his vision and everything is becoming distant and unreal, Nick still manages a moan because it’s _terrifying_ , staring into the infinite sucking black and it’s like his very soul is being devoured, everything that he is being sucked out through his skin and he can’t, it hurts, make it _stop_ —

“ _Yessss,_ ” the darkness rumbles, monstrous and ghastly, nightmares and death and utter, utter _nothing_ all at once. “ _Come to meee. Feed meee._ ”

Nick whimpers, twists, struggles but he’s lost, he knows that now, Viktor has claimed him, nothing but darkness and blackness and the terrible bloody red, and he squeezes his eyes shut and feels his life ebbing away and thinks suddenly, nonsensically, _Sean._

“ _Fils de pute!_ ”

Something hits him with the force of an eighteen-wheeler. The world slams sideways, everything suddenly jumbled and very far away. He claws for awareness, calls on all his Grimm instincts to bring him that thread of consciousness and grasp it and _pull_ , and it isn’t much but it’s enough. It brings him back to the warehouse at least, to the cold of the floor against his back and the thin rays of moonlight playing across the roof overhead, and somewhere in the distance, the unmistakable sounds of a fight.

He forces himself to turn, groaning as a wave of dizziness hits and sends the world spinning. Nick grits his teeth and slaps his palm down against the cold concrete, the shock of pain momentarily bringing him back, and through rapidly-darkening vision he squints at the two human figures currently crouched on the other side of the warehouse, tense like coils just ready to spring.

One of them is Viktor, has to be: he’s wearing the same stupid suit that probably cost more than Nick’s entire life savings, but his face—it’s still woged, because even half-unconscious Nick knows that has to be it: this is what a Royal looks like when he drops all pretense at being human. The darkness is terrible to see, an endless swirling nothingness except for the two coal-pits of burning red, and looking into it is like falling into Hell itself, everything demonic and evil in this world collected in a single horrifying visage. Looking at it raises the hairs on the back of Nick’s neck, sends goosebumps shivering down his arms and he has to turn away, can’t stand the freezing cold and so he forces his gaze to the newcomer instead, the man who saved him and it’s—

Renard. Nick blinks, staring at his captain—and it _is_ his captain, he realizes with a skip of his heart. Renard is _here,_ summoned by Nick’s silent call like an answer to a prayer, and even though his throat still feels like someone stepped on it, even though every tortured breath makes blackness explode in his vision like strange reversed fireworks, Nick feels something in his chest loosen and melt. Renard is here: Nick’s captain, his friend, his Prince. Everything’s going to be okay.

And it is as if that realization takes care of everything, breaking down the last of Nick’s defenses. The darkness closes in, and in the distance Nick thinks Renard turns to look at him. He tries to smile then, because he’s just going to close his eyes for a bit, just a bit and then he’ll get up and they’ll beat the shit out of Viktor together, but Renard must not understand because his captain turns back to Viktor and something changes in his face, his eyes taking on that same demonic, dark red, and holy shit doesn’t he know how fucking _scary_ that looks?

And then Renard’s lips move, hissing something that sounds like “ _Mine,_ ” and his voice is distorted now too, deep and echoing like Viktor’s but that might just be Nick’s brain shutting off, and in the fading grey he sees the two Royals leap at each other and he has just enough time to think _I hope he rips Viktor’s throat out_ before it all comes down and Nick goes away for a while.

 

He wakes to the smell of tea and the face of a worried blutbad hovering over him. Nick groans. “Monroe.”

His voice comes out like something that might have been a sound once, before it was shot full of glass and then run over by a truck. His friend, however, seems to get the message because Monroe straightens up immediately, turning to fiddle with something on the coffee table. “Welcome back,” he says, and an instant later he offers a steaming mug. “You sound terrible.”

“I _feel_ terrible,” Nick answers, accepting the mug with a nod of thanks and a quick glance around the room. He’s in Monroe’s living room, the pull-out couch soft beneath him. Rosalee is nowhere to be seen.

His throat is a straw lined with sandpaper, but the tea soothes going down, and Nick has to remind himself to drink slowly to avoid burning himself. Wouldn’t that be just great, to die of a melted esophagus after Renard went through all the trouble of—

_Renard._

“Whoa—hey, take it easy!” Monroe’s palm stops Nick’s rise, warm and firm against his shoulder. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

Nick coughs. “The captain…”

“Oh.” Monroe nods, something lightening in his expression. “Right. Sean.”

“Where…?”

“On the back porch.” Monroe takes the mug from him, the pale ceramic dwarfed by his long fingers. He nods toward the kitchen. “It’s the first time he left your side since he brought you here.”

A brief pause, and then Monroe’s voice drops. “He, uh. He didn’t tell us much about what happened, but it looked like one hell of a fight.”

The last word lilts up like a question, Monroe’s gaze intense, and Nick nods, easing up into a seated position. “Viktor, he…” He shudders at the memory and shakes his head. How can he explain something so unexplainable, so horrific and terrifying?

Brief silence. Then: “You saw it, didn’t you?”

He looks up, and Monroe’s expression is soft. “A Royal woge,” the blutbad clarifies.

Nick swallows and nods. Monroe sighs. “I’ve never seen it,” he says, and Nick senses the caution in his words. “But I’ve heard it’s one of the scariest things you can ever experience.”

“What—” The word comes out like rusted metal. Nick coughs and tries again. “What are they?”

“Don’t know, man, that’s way above my pay grade,” Monroe answers. Then he looks meaningfully at the back door. “But there’s someone else who would know.”

Nick sighs and nods. “Yeah. Help me up.”

Turns out, aside from a few bruises from Viktor’s initial attack and his injured airway, he’s mostly okay. Monroe tells him Renard took the brunt of it after he passed out, and even though he assures Nick the wounds weren’t life-threatening, it doesn’t stop his breath from catching in his throat when he finally pushes the back door open and sees the tall figure bent over the porch railing.

He knows intuitively that Renard won the fight; he wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t. But still, when his captain turns to face him, Nick can’t help the flare of anger that rises in his gut, the Grimm inside howling for Viktor’s blood when he sees the sling over Renard’s shoulder keeping his left arm immobile, the butterfly stitches over the slash across his cheek, the way his fingers tremble as he taps his cigarette against the cheap red ashtray perched atop the railing next to his hand.

He tamps down on the rising fury and steps forward. “Captain.”

Renard nods. “Detective,” he answers, and Nick doesn’t miss the brief grimace as he lifts the cigarette to his lips. The neatly-buttoned shirt and thick coat hide nothing; Renard holds himself like a wounded animal.

 _Viktor is dead,_ he reminds himself to keep the Grimm from bubbling up to the surface, and he doesn’t realize he said that out loud until Renard nods and turns away to look up at the moon shining above them, pale and forlorn in the starless sky. “And quite indignant about it, I’m sure.” Smoke wafts from between his lips with each word.

Nick swallows and comes to stand beside him. He tilts his head at the ashtray. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

That earns him a quick sideways glance. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Nick.”

“Yeah.” Nick waits for Renard to take another drag on his cigarette before turning to lean one hip against the railing. “So why don’t you tell me.”

When all Renard does is look at him, Nick sighs and swipes a thumb across his jaw, stubble rough against his skin. “That…thing Viktor did,” he says. “What he became. That’s what it looks like when a Royal woges, isn’t it?”

Renard hums. “Only full-blooded Royals. A half-breed like me doesn’t get that fancy.”

And, later, they are going to have words about the way he says _half-breed_ , like it’s normal, like it’s right. But right now Nick has more important questions to ask. He tilts his head and says, “But that’s why you don’t like to woge in front of me. Because that’s what you see reflected in my eyes.”

Renard hums and looks away. His fingers twitch just slightly, dislodging a few crumbs of ash from the end of his cigarette. When he speaks, his voice is carefully, frustratingly neutral. “That darkness you saw,” he murmurs, “You felt what it was, didn’t you?”

Nick nods. He can’t forget it: the sensation of falling, of losing everything about himself in the emptiness of Viktor’s face. “It was…nothingness. A void.” He swallows. “It was terrifying.”

Renard nods. “That’s what we are,” he says. “The opposite of everything, of life itself. We rule over wesen and humans alike because, at any time, we have the power to swallow them into nothing.”

His gaze drops to the cigarette in his hand. “It’s a terrible thing to see just once,” he says, soft. “So you’ll forgive me for being a little averse to your gaze.”

The way he says it is probably supposed to be nonchalant, but Nick doesn’t need Grimm instincts to sense the vulnerability underneath. Renard still isn’t looking at him, and finally Nick reaches out, wrapping firm fingers around his captain’s arm. “Hey.”

Renard turns. There’s something in his eyes now, something Nick’s never seen before but he wouldn’t object to viewing more. He smiles then, and tightens his grip. “Thank you for saving my life.”

Renard blinks. Nick lets the silence hang and reaches forward, snatching the cigarette from unprotesting fingers and lifting it to his own lips.

He’s halfway through inhaling, the familiar taste of nicotine and smoke flooding his lungs, before the arm beneath his hand shifts. “That’s mine,” Renard says, and Nick turns to see him watching him with clear confusion clouding his features.

Nick just shrugs and exhales. “I know,” he says, and looks at Renard.

And after a moment, the captain’s expression softens. The corner of his mouth twitches before curving up into a smile, and Nick decides then and there that it doesn’t matter if Renard doesn’t ever woge in front of him. The smile, the softness in his eyes, is more than enough.

Silence falls, easy and safe. Nick looks up at the moon above. Renard doesn’t ask him to remove his hand.

The smoke from the cigarette curls up into the night sky like a spirit finally freed.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Regarding translations:** All my works, including this one, can be translated without first asking my express permission. I ask only that you credit me as the original author and provide a link back to the original work. For anything other than translations, please ask first. Thanks.


End file.
